LOVESTRUCK by SASHA FRERE-JONES Scritti Politti trades theory for feelings. New Yorker magazine - Issue of 2006-07-24

If you walk into an American bar and ask for Scritti Politti, the bartender will probably put on the British band’s 1985 hit “Perfect Way.” The song is similar to music of the period by New York club artists like Madonna: very loud snare drums matched with bright keyboard lines and even brighter guitars. Green Gartside, Scritti Politti’s singer, songwriter, guitarist, and only continuous member, performs both lead and backing vocals. His voice is high—almost, but not quite, falsetto. Over the punishingly clear instruments, he sounds blissful, teetering on the edge of rapture. The chorus ends with a line of stock dance-floor chat—“I got a perfect way to make the girls go crazy”—but the verses suggest that the singer spends more of his time at the independent bookstore: “I don’t have a purpose, omission, I’m empty by definition. I got a lack, girl, that you’d love to be.” You don’t need to catch the literary references to be taken by the song, and it’s unlikely that when the band lip-synched to “Perfect Way” on “American Bandstand,” in 1985, Dick Clark started wondering where his Jacques Lacan books were. Gartside’s singing is so fiercely unmasculine that if he weren’t obviously enjoying himself so much you would think he was making fun of the Boy Georges and George Michaels of the world.

Gartside’s career has been marked by unlikely turns. In 1985, at the height of his popularity, he looked like the other pretty blond boys on MTV, except that he cited Wittgenstein in magazine interviews. Seven years earlier, when he formed Scritti Politti, a musical collective of autodidacts who took their name from a book by the political theorist Antonio Gramsci, he was living in a Camden Town squat without a bathroom. Now, twenty-one years after becoming an American pop star, Gartside has released “White Bread, Black Beer,” Scritti Politti’s fifth album, though Gartside made it entirely by himself, in his home in Hackney. The record bears little relation to the ramshackle singles that Scritti Politti released in 1978, or to the obsessively polished R. & B. that made its lead singer famous. Gartside, who is fifty-one, has created an astonishingly mellifluous and coherent album, which is indebted to the sixties pop he heard as a child on BBC Radio 1 in Wales, where he was born.

Scritti Politti was initially three musicians, whose political outlook echoed that of other London punk bands—the covers of Scritti Politti’s first singles foregrounded the means of production, so to speak, by listing the records’ manufacturing costs and the addresses of local pressing plants—though their music lacked punk’s aggression. Even in the band’s early days, when Gartside was just beginning to teach himself to play guitar, he made music that was soft and approachable. His singing—breathy, sweet, and generally affectless—was partly inspired by Michael Jackson, whom he can sometimes approximate, and his songs tend to cycle restlessly through motifs and styles. His lyrics avoid direct confession and flowery metaphors; he embraces the conventions of pop songwriting—he’s fond of the word “girl”—just enough to make a song sound inviting, and then lards it with clever political jokes, like “his hammer and his popsicle,” which he dropped into “Asylums in Jerusalem,” from 1980.

“Jerusalem” is one of several early songs in which Scritti Politti abandoned rock—at least as a sound—for reggae, a genre Gartside heard on the London pirate radio station Dread Broadcasting Corporation. In 1981, Gartside wrote a lilting reggae ballad called “The ‘Sweetest Girl’ ” (note the interrogating quotes), which he intended to be recorded as a duet by Gregory Isaacs, a Jamaican singer of romantic songs, and Kraftwerk, the robotic German electronic band. (“I got a positive response from Gregory,” Gartside told me. “But I went to see Tito Puente with Kraftwerk in New York, and they told me they didn’t like reggae. So I ended up doing it myself.”) Gartside made his philosophical interests explicit in a track called “Jacques Derrida” (1982), a jolly two-step that sounds like a sped-up and neutered version of an Alan Jackson song. Nineteen-eighties academia will live forever in Gartside’s lyrics about the French deconstructionist, now out of favor, who was then a staple of liberal-arts syllabi: “I’m in love with Jacques Derrida, read a page and I know what I need to take apart my baby’s heart—I’m in love.”

By the time “The ‘Sweetest Girl’ ” and “Jacques Derrida” came out, Scritti Politti existed only in the studio. After suffering a panic attack at a live show in Brighton in 1980, Gartside stopped performing. He hired a manager, Bob Last, and teamed up with two New York musicians: the keyboardist David Gamson and the drummer Fred Maher. This version of Scritti Politti eventually signed to Warner Bros. and released “Cupid & Psyche 85,” which was a hit all over the world, largely on the strength of “Perfect Way.” Like the song, the album is exuberant; Gartside’s theory jokes and political swipes are buried inside music built for dance floors and MTV.

Gartside made two more albums with Scritti Politti: “Provision” (1988), which contains the brilliant, syncopated “Boom! There She Was,” the band’s last song to chart in America; and “Anomie & Bonhomie,” a confused anthology of perky songs interrupted by guest rappers, which was released in 1999 to universal indifference. In the intervening period, Gartside lived in Wales, doing little. “I’ve led my own version of a charmed life,” he told me. “Bob Last and I went to the record companies with a somewhat rapacious attitude, and there’s been enough money to keep me aloft.”

Gartside’s muses have always been gentle in tenor—reggae and the smoother side of American R. & B. Now, though, his inspirations are the generous melodies and sunny outlook of the sixties. Love, an emotion that in the past Gartside has bracketed in quotes, animates the songs on “White Bread, Black Beer.” “Snow in Sun,” for example, is an affecting promise made to someone who is “brave”: “You will never be without me, you will never need to doubt me, there’ll be something good about me soon.” Bells and keyboards that sound like bells twinkle in the background, an acoustical approximation of sun reflecting off snow. In “Locked,” another atypically direct love song—“When I’m with you, baby, I know just who I am, and no one understands the way that you do”—Gartside conveys his ambivalence about being a pop performer in the context of actual, non-ironic love: “You know how little this all means. People want a part of you but who they get is never who he seems.”

Gartside has been multitracking his voice ever since “Cupid & Psyche 85,” but “White Bread, Black Beer” takes this practice further. In “Locked,” the vocals are not just doubled but stacked up until they become clouds of harmony. The lyrics are as personal as Gartside gets, even though the singer has replicated himself into at least half a dozen singers, a peaceful army of voices delivering a pledge to a specific woman.

Even “Dr. Abernathy,” a potentially cynical song, is sweet, in an oblique way. The song is the album’s most energetic, a beefy rock number that could have been performed by Squeeze twenty-five years ago. The lyrics are obscure. Dr. Abernathy is looking “for methamphetamine, for volunteers,” but the lyrics leave him behind and turn to stock pop-song phrases—“Please don’t go away”—and, oddly, the title of Brand Nubian’s hip-hop song “Punks Jump Up to Get Beat Down.” What’s notable, though, is that Gartside is singing about a particular doctor, a person with a name. The young Gartside, who founded a branch of the Young Communist League as a teen- ager, would have written a clever, impersonal song about national health care, filled with puns about caring for a girl and sending a letter about it all in care of Tony Blair.